Tera Nova Zarra: Press

BRANDON SEIFERT - WILLAMETTE WEEK

It’s late October, the last days of East Burnside’s Outlaws Music Hall, and the club’s green room is full of people pulling on costumes, applying eyeliner and doing warm-up stretches. It’d be easy to mistake this for a play, but it’s not. It’s a rock show.

Tera Nova Zarra, the lead singer, is going over a props list when I come in (they’re missing fake blood). She hands me some plastic roses—apparently I’m going to be part of the show. My bit comes later, onstage, after one of the band’s admirers is slain, comes back as a werewolf, and shoots a bow and arrow with her feet while doing a handstand. As the next song starts, I give Zarra the roses and she bats her eyelashes at me.

“You are a repeat offender,” Zarra sings, “in matters of the heart. You want my sweet surrender, but I’ll never surrender,” she continues—as the bassist holds up a two-by-four, “’cuz I’m a ninja!”

Zarra punches the board in half with her fistful of flowers, and throws the bouquet into the cheering crowd. Then she starts headbanging.

(photo by Tom Oliver)

THE PORTLAND MERCURY
Stefanefit

Worlds collide and so do a horde of local acrobats for the world's first and only Stefanefit, a benefit for injured Austrian National Team Sport Acrobat, Stefan Furst. Members of DoJump, Circus Artemis, Imago, and Night Flight Aerial present an anything-goes circus filled with spectacle, things you do not see coming, and people with impossible agility.

KELLY CLARKE - WILLAMETTE WEEK
Stefanefit

Portland’s acrobatic community comes together for a spinning, juggling, backflipping, contorting benefit for “former Austrian National Team sport acrobat” Stefan Furst. Furst, who has trained a number of performers at Do Jump! and local gymnastics organizations, was injured in a windsurfing accident and can’t work. Benefit organizer (and ninja band Fist of Dishonor frontwoman) Tera Nova Zarra says the community just wants to give back to a man who has helped them all so much. Expect performances from aerialists Night Flight, fire dancer Shireen Press, juggler Curtis Carlyle and Brittany Walsh (think handstands and bow and arrows) and a slew of Do Jump!-ers, among others. But the giving doesn’t stop at Furst—the Vienna-born acrobat will in turn give part of the proceeds raised for his medical bills to Haiti relief.

HOLLY JOHNSON - THE OREGONIAN
'Tiger Lilly and Sunny Lu' offers an enchanting cat's-eye view of life

A cat’s world takes on proportions and values of its own. A couch becomes an entire universe, kitty toys dangled from above are looming aliens, and the sunny spot by the window is more coveted than a pot of gold.

In Do Jump!’s charming new show “Tiger Lilly and Sunny Lu,” company performers really get under the skin — make that the fur — of felines as they romp, wrestle, stretch and cuddle, blending dance, acrobatics and trapeze artistry with an uncanny understanding of cat behavior.

ALISON HALLETT - THE PORTLAND MERCURY
Circus Artemis' All-Girl Extravaganza

For three performances this weekend, Circus Artemis will overrun the warehouse with an all-women assemblage of contemporary circus acts, including trapeze artists, stilt walkers, and clowns. The kicker, though? Not only are all of the performers women, but the crew is as well, from the lighting technician to the graphic designer to the photographers who will document the show.

MICHAEL MCGREGOR - THE OREGONIAN
APIS, or the Taste of Honey - Imago

Pushing the envelope is nothing new for Imago Theatre's Jerry Mouawad. But his latest creation -- a one-hour wordless drama set in a military prison in which characters behave like honeybees -- would seem a dubious stretch even for him.

But in some irrational, or maybe sub-rational, way it works.

While dance, mime and even acrobatics are part of the show, "APIS" has the arc and thrust of drama. Drama that moves, that is, with echoes of "West Side Story," Grand Guignol and Charlie Chaplin films. The story can be hard to follow but throughout the hour you feel the restless buzz and instinctive movement of the hive -- apian or human. It is, as Mouawad calls it, like an "opera beyond words."

PETER SCHROEDER - REED COLLEGE

Fist of Dishonor is kind of like one of those old monster movies: You think ninjas are cool, so you go, but really you're just expecting some guys in rubber suits shouting gibberish that might sound Japanese. But when you get there, you find out that the ninjas are actually ninja, and they brought along their friends from the werewolf and zombie movies as well, and really everything is just completely awesome, and the only thing preventing you from totally rocking out is the worry that you might miss seeing something. I can't wait to bring them back.

Peter Schroeder
Co-Producer/Director
Weapons of Mass Distraction

SASHA BURCHUK - PDX PIPELINE
A Suicide Note From a Cockroach (Imago)

Based on Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri’s eponymous work, Carlos Alexis Cruz’s play A Suicide Note From a Cockroach is a witty circus of a soap opera about life in a Puerto Rican neighborhood of New York.

Pedro has been married six times to six dead women. His first wife was a kleptomaniac who dropped dead. His second wife was a demonic German woman who walked off playing a kazoo and then died. His third wife was an acrobat hooker who got shot. The fourth was always sick; she wanted him to sell his organs on the black market so she could have surgery. The fifth wife was some kind of revolutionary guerilla who made him do drills in their living room. She was so paranoid that one day, convinced that there were assassins stalking her, she stabbed herself in the stomach. After she died, Pedro swore he would never marry again…but then he met Kimberly, who died on their wedding day.

All of this would make for a pretty grim play if it weren’t for the fact that the cast is made up of acrobats from Portland’s Do Jump! troupe. The effect is a darkly humorous charade of handsprings and captivating social satire.

BEN WATERHOUSE - WILLAMETTE WEEK
La Carpa del Maestro (Miracle Theatre)
(photo by Stephanie Davis)

Mexico, like most Latino cultures, has a pervasive cult of the dead that sees its fullest expression in the ancestor worship and macabre partying of Dia de los Muertos. In the U.S., we go to great lengths to ensure our ancestors stay buried, pumping them full of preservatives and dumping concrete on their coffins. We’ve replaced ancestor worship with a cleaner and more profitable reverence for nostalgia that sees fullest expression in early evening programming on public television. Why not combine the two?

BRANDON SEIFERT - WILLAMETTE WEEK

From a city with enough ninja-inspired rock outfits to lay siege on a small village (or a rock concert, à la Satyricon's Ninja Rock Festival last November) comes a mysterious band. A band that does the shtick right. A band that writes songs about the ninja lifestyle and battles colorfully costumed opponents on a blue tumbling mat at the front of the stage. A band called Fist of Dishonor.

SCOTT MAXWELL - DOUBLES STUNTING BASE, KAZUM

Tera, you are a rock. I love working with a flier who's built the way you are. Your body is powerful and strong... holding your shoulders, biceps or arms is like gripping marble... Despite the fury contained within your fists you're one of the most gentle and nice people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. I have a really high opinion of you.
(reprinted with permission)

BRANDON SEIFERT - WILLAMETTE WEEK

I could tell it was going to be an awesome concert when I saw the table full of Mexican wrestlers.

They stood out in Ash Street Saloon, because the other patrons were dressed as ninjas, kung fu masters, or spacemen—the night’s theme was Aliens vs. Ninjas, after all. But the guys in luchador masks, sitting surly at a corner table the pinball machines, brought the whole scene over the top into WTF-land. Later, I’d learn that they were Caliente and his gang Los Diablos Guapos, here to challenge Fist Of Dishonor’s lead singer to a wrestling match.

(photo by Brandon Seifert)

ANDY KRYZA - WILLAMETTE WEEK
Best Up-and-Coming Persona Band

Portland loves persona bands. We've got pirates (Sunken Chest and Captain Bogg & Salty), banshees (Iron Maidens) and drag queens from hell (Sissyboy). Now ninjas are rising. Fist of Dishonor (www.fistofdishonor.com), a five-piece outfit of hooded, nunchaku-toting killers, churns out metallic pop about dirty fights and randy senseis while leader Missy Jitsu attacks enemies in the audience using "Rock Star Kung Fu" (watch out for the Pete Townshend Toosh-Over-Teakettle Defense). As guitar solos rip and the bodies of fallen enemies pile up (seriously), the sonic boom of a rock show blends with the violent fun of an assassin's tango. Think Kill Bill: The Musical.